Tauck Holds Second Ken Burns Jazz Event in New Orleans

Tauck operated its Tauck Ken Burns Jazz Event for the second time in New Orleans March 6-10. The five-day/four-night event is one of Tauck’s growing portfolio of events, which have become a distinct product line that stands alongside the company’s traditional World Discovery tours, family-oriented Bridges programs, river cruises, small ship ocean cruises and its culturally immersive Culturious series.

Other events in the series are the Civil War event, the Baseball event, the London event, the Chicago event, the Rose Bowl event and the Kentucky Derby event. The event series uses the institutional logistical expertise acquired from more than 90 years of operating tours but focuses on a single destination, setting up in a headquarters hotel and exploring the area in relation to the chosen theme, in this case jazz. The Jazz, Civil War and Baseball events were developed in partnership with filmmaker Ken Burns and draw on the knowledge gained through his research in creating his celebrated documentary films.

“We thought that we could sort of meld our expertise of perhaps seeing a different side of the location, one that we had learned in the course of intense study for a film and it would benefit the people who would come to these tours,” said Burns, who gave a keynote address on the second night of the event and met with guests for conversation and photographs.

The Jazz event used the Ritz Carlton New Orleans as its headquarters hotel. It gathered approximately 200 people, who were divided into several smaller subgroups each led by different Tauck tour directors. Each group followed a different track of sightseeing and activities during the day and joined together as a whole group for evening events. Each of the subgroups participated in the same sightseeing and activities, but traveled to each of the sites in rotating order.

Activities included performances by the Ellis Marsalis quartet, Donald Harrison, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, the Dukes of Dixieland and Doreen’s Jazz. Also included were lunches, dinners and receptions at Arnaud’s, the Court of Two Sisters, New Orleans Jazzquarters and Commander’s Palace; visits to Preservation Hall, the Cabildo Museum, the Backstreet Cultural Museum and the St. Augustine’s Church; a cruise on the Mississippi on the steamboat Natchez; and lectures by architect Nellie Watson and Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of Tulane University’s Hogan Jazz Archive.

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